Hilton Tarrant is production editor at Moneyweb. His main focus is project management for the listed company’s local and international websites, and contributes to their strategic direction. From time-to-time, he also fills in for Alec Hogg on the SAfm Market Update with Moneyweb radio programme. In between, he covers the ICT sector, with a particular focus on mobile and telecoms.

The lack of gender and racial (or ‘ethnic’ in US-parlance) diversity in the technology sector is amplified in Silicon Valley. Obviously it’s more noticeable at the new breed of US tech giants, especially as they disclose more and more detail after going public.
But, having overwhelmingly white, male engineers is a problem in the US, the UK, most of Europe, even in some emerging markets like South Africa. It's particularly acute in the US given how the overall US population ...

In the first nine-odd weeks that Microsoft has owned Nokia, it contributed US$1.99-billion in revenue and a US$692-million net loss. It's big enough to be material, given that Microsoft reported total revenue of US$19.9-billion and operating profit of US$6-billion in the quarter. Nokia is 10% of sales, and a significant drag on profits.
Between April 25 and June 30, the Nokia devices business sold 5.8-million Lumia smartphones and 30.3-million other devices (what it terms “non-Lumia phones”). That 30.3-million figure includes ...

At Google’s I/O conference last month, the internet giant unveiled Android One – an initiative that will help connect (at least) the next billion people. This is not a charitable move. Rather, as the number of smartphones globally head to 2-billion in the next 12 months, everyone competing in the space faces the real risk of running out of growth.
For Google, this risk is even more acute. Beyond the close on 2-billion people already using smartphones, the next billion ...

The App Store isn't broken. At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) earlier this month, it announced that there are now 1.2-million apps in the store and that users visit it 300-million times every week. To date (since July 2008), 75 billion apps have been downloaded by iOS users. That makes it the most successful (by far) software market in history.
Except, the App Store is broken. Benedict Evans, now partner at venture capital outfit A16Z, repeats this mantra often: mobile ...

It's no surprise that Dropbox has been frantically working to ship products that aren’t a commodity cloud syncing service… Carousel, its app that strings together and orders all your photos and videos in easily-searchable galleries is, perhaps, the first example. Its acquisition of Mailbox needs to be seen in this light too. Expect more.
Why? Because the price (and value) of bog-standard cloud storage is going to zero. It's already a commodity. (And the irony is Dropbox helped turn it into ...

Its easy to get caught up in feature-hype. After all, Apple probably announced over 1000 new features for its OSX and iOS operating systems at Monday’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote. Features that gave the uppercut to Google, Dropbox, Hightail, Skitch, Docusign, PDF pen, Everpix (which shut last year), Dragon dictation, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and more. But look through the hype.
Over the past year (perhaps longer), Apple’s spent a lot of time actually thinking about and understanding how its customers use ...

Perhaps the announcement that the (former) Department of Communications, responsible for the broadcasting and telecoms sectors in South Africa, would be renamed to the Department of Telecommunications and Postal Services tells us all we need to know?
With the flashback to the 1990s, it's almost as if ICT never converged.
Both Nigeria (which overtook South Africa as the continent’s bigger economy earlier this year) and Kenya have ministries focused on ICT; the former, the Federal Ministry of Communication Technology, the latter, ...

This time, Microsoft means business. At the original Surface tablet launch in 2012, it told us it meant business. Again, at the far more muted Surface 2 launch in September last year. Perhaps it didn’t really, really mean business those first two times. This time, it's different. Promise.
The euphoria around new chief executive Satya Nadella’s first 100 days in charge has tapered off, mostly completely. In fact, it died down after the company’s Build event in early April.
It's fair to ...

There’s a lot about Apple’s purchase of Beats Electronics -- a headphone maker and streaming music provider -- for somewhere north of US$3-billion that doesn't add up. That is, if there’s a deal at all (it remains one of those deals “according to people familiar with the matter”).
Mobile analyst (now partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) Benedict Evans suggests that an Apple/Beats tie-up is “something of a Rorschach Blot - people who think Apple has lost its way see ...

It’s different this time. In South Africa’s last general election in 2009, 99% of people had never even heard of Twitter (only a handful of people in the county had accounts back then, and they hardly used them). This time round, millions are on Twitter. Over 5.5-million, in fact (according to the most recent study by World Wide Worx). By this stage, that number’s probably closer to 6-million… All tweeting, retweeting and consuming in real-time.
Of course the US Presidential Election ...